The White Tower Read online

  ‘What about?’ Livy kept her voice neutral as she dropped her rucksack on the floor and kicked it under the hall table. But the skin on the back of her neck began to prickle.

  Her mother didn’t say anything while she leant the bike up against the hall radiator. She took out the bags of sugar and flour from the basket and handed them to Livy.

  ‘You get on with the cake and I’ll go and get Tom,’ she said, smiling. ‘Dad will tell you when he gets home.’ She flashed a smile. ‘Really, it’ll all be fine! Nothing to worry about.’

  But Livy knew that whenever adults said there was nothing to worry about, there usually was.

  ‘Wow!’ her younger brother Tom whispered as he climbed on a chair and leant across the kitchen table to admire Livy’s handiwork. Waves of pale blue icing covered in silver balls, glitter sugar and paper butterflies risking their wings against every birthday candle in the box.

  ‘We’ve got nothing to worry about, Tom,’ Livy said, smiling at his thoughtful face. ‘So I thought I’d make a nothing-to-worry-about cake!’

  ‘Can I land this on the blue?’ he said, looking up at her, a streak of dried tomato ketchup on his chin. He uncurled his hand to show Livy his prized plastic aeroplane.

  ‘Sure!’ Livy laughed.

  There had been days over the summer when she had felt very alone. And unlike her mother, who had looked worried or asked her how she felt, Tom had just put his arms around her and told her not to ‘be sad’. She had spent hours lost in his flying games and his simple adoration of her always made her feel better.

  Tom lifted his arm high above his head and made whooshy noises as he made the plane come into land. He took out a couple of candles and the wing of a paper butterfly but looked so happy with the plane half submerged in the icing that Livy didn’t have the heart to say anything.

  ‘Now it is a boy’s cake, and Dad can eat it and not die!’

  The front door slammed and Tom yelled, ‘Dad!’ and dived under the table to do his standard hide and pounce routine. Livy heard her parents laugh and then their voices dropped. They were no doubt discussing the ‘nothing to worry about’. And then her father came in with his messy hair and his shirt collar peeking out of his favourite wrinkled sweater, looking as if he’d done nothing more interesting than spend all day reading on the sofa. He looked, well, normal. What was going on?

  Tom leapt out from under the table, clamped his arms round his father’s leg and yelled, ‘Prisoner!’

  His father laughed and said, ‘I surrender, Count Zacha!’ He scooped Tom up and ruffled his hair. He looked at Livy. ‘Everything OK?’

  He looked so hopeful that Livy made herself smile. ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  ‘Great cake!’ He collapsed in a kitchen chair, making Tom squeal with excitement as he pretended to drop him on the floor. ‘This is what flying feels like, hey, Tom?’ He hauled Tom back on to his lap and hugged him.

  Livy thought, No, I don’t think it does. I think that flying might be a lot more frightening:no one would be there to catch you. But she didn’t say anything. It was better to keep these odd, random thoughts that insisted on floating up out of nowhere to herself.

  ‘So?’ Livy’s mother cut a large slice of cake and lifted it on to one of her pretty flower plates. She placed it in front of her husband.

  Tom reached forward and put his finger into the wave of icing and then placed the icing in his mouth. ‘It tastes of blue,’ he said, his eyes closed.

  ‘Hey!’ Livy’s father laughed. ‘Cake thief!’

  ‘Don’t change the subject,’ Livy’s mother said, frowning. ‘You need to tell Livy your news.’

  Livy’s dad looked at her, his expression more serious now. ‘Well, the news is . . . I’ve got a new job!’ he said.

  ‘Oh!’ said Livy. This really was not much to worry about, then. ‘Great.’

  ‘But that’s not all,’ Livy’s mother murmured.

  ‘I’m sure it’s a very nice job,’ Livy said, dropping a lump of sugar into her glass beaker of tea.

  Her father looked thoughtful. ‘I think it is going to be a nice job,’ he said. ‘And good for all of us . . .’

  ‘James . . .’ Livy’s mother warned.

  Livy’s father bit the corner off the slice of cake and sat forward in his chair. ‘Do you know Temple College?’

  Livy was about to say, the school where they wear pale grey blazers? The school on the river? The oldest school in London? But her father clearly wasn’t expecting her actually to answer.

  ‘Of course you do. Well, I received a letter about a month ago inviting me to apply for the job as librarian. And I’ve just been appointed.’

  Livy glanced at her mother to gauge how she was meant to react. Was this the ‘nothing to worry about’?

  ‘And the best thing is –’ Livy’s mother took a sip of her tea – ‘it means that they will offer you a place.’

  ‘If the headmistress likes you,’ Livy’s father said, looking suddenly very serious.

  ‘A place at Temple College?’ The image of the boy’s laughing grey eyes as he dropped her travelcard flared up in her mind. ‘But it’s so expensive. Only rich kids go there.’

  Livy’s father shook his head. ‘Not for you, Livy. We Burgesses may not be rich, but my job means that they will give you a scholarship so it won’t cost us much. You just need to have a little interview,’ he said, as if this were no more challenging than eating cake.

  ‘Interview?’ Livy said. ‘But I can’t. You know I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ Her father replied.

  Livy saw her mother put her hand on her father’s arm as if to warn him not to press things. But this infuriated her.

  ‘Because,’ she said, swallowing the lump in her throat, ‘because I won’t know what to say to her. And I’ll feel like an idiot.’ She pushed the plate with her slice of cake away from her. ‘Why don’t you both stop trying to decide what’s best for me and just leave me alone?’

  The silence grew. She could feel that her parents were looking at each other, trying to work out how to start the conversation again. Well, she wouldn’t help them. They could keep their stupid school for rich kids.

  ‘Thing is,’ Livy’s mother said, ‘Dad’s new job comes with a house. We’ll be moving to the school anyway. It makes sense, really, doesn’t it?’ There was a little gap and then her mother added, ‘You’ll be able to roll out of bed and go straight to school! No bus, no walk, nothing. All really easy!’

  ‘This is a fantastic chance for you, Livy.’ Her father’s voice had a note of exasperation in it. ‘And for us too. I’ve always wanted to work in an ancient library with a collection of rare and priceless books! Of course, we’ll have to leave this house and Tom will have to change nurseries, but Mum and I think it’s all worth it for you to have a fresh start after what happened in the summer.’

  Livy felt as if she was teetering on the very edge of something and didn’t know how to pull herself back.

  ‘I just don’t want to go,’ she said, standing up.

  Livy lay very still in her bed. It was dark and the house was quiet. She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to look into the heavy branches of the tree outside her window or watch the leaves stir in the breeze.

  ‘Just another normal day,’ she said, softly, as if saying those words might make it true. Like a spell. But it wasn’t another normal day and she clearly had no special powers to make it that way. The day had spun out of control and images hovered in front of her eyes. The boy on the bus in the Temple College blazer. The kind man in the park and his stupid old books (which she had thrown on the floor somewhere). Her light-headedness, her shortness of breath, the ‘dizzy spells’ that she had kept secret . . .

  These had started earlier in the summer when she had visited Mahalia in hospital and her friend could no longer do more than stare at the monitor next to her bed. Livy had pretended not to notice and tried her best to tell Mahalia what had happened at school. But it was as if she was speaki
ng to someone very far away; Mahalia didn’t respond and her parents didn’t leave the bedside. Leukaemia. From the Greek leukos and hemia, she had read on the internet. White blood. When ‘good, normal’ blood, her own blood, was red.

  Livy was so upset when she got home from the hospital for the last time that she couldn’t catch her breath. She couldn’t seem to get the air into her lungs quickly enough.

  And since Mahalia’s mother had phoned with what her mother called ‘the saddest news’, Livy had begun to have other, more worrying sensations that she couldn’t tell anyone about. How could she explain how her blood – not white, not malignant, not altered – itched and pushed her up from the ground? She would look up into the large, empty sky and know in her deep, secret self that she could dive into that infinite blue as easily as she might dive in a swimming pool.

  Livy pressed the backs of her legs into the mattress, trying to make herself heavy. But her body felt as if it might dissolve, like smoke.

  ‘Livy?’ Her mother’s voice.

  There was no point pretending to be asleep because her mother was already sitting on the side of Livy’s bed.

  ‘Why don’t you want to go to Temple College?’ Her mother’s words hung in the air. ‘It’s a golden opportunity for a clever girl like you.’

  Her parents had taken to talking to her as if she were something special, all part of their plan of making her feel more self-confident, she guessed. But it had quite the opposite effect.

  If the boy in the blazer were typical of the pupils, she would struggle to make friends. He had seemed so confident, so at ease with himself, had no problem talking to people he didn’t know, whereas her body was behaving so strangely there were days when she woke up and thought that she had just been dumped in someone else’s badly fitting shell.

  ‘I’m not the right sort of girl,’ she whispered.

  ‘But you can’t know that,’ her mother said. ‘You have so much potential that you haven’t begun to understand, yet.’

  Livy sighed. ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘What?’

  Livy didn’t want to say anything, but when her mother squeezed her arm reassuringly, she suddenly couldn’t keep it in any longer.

  ‘I promised Mahalia that we would always be friends and that no one else could ever take her place. I promised her that I wouldn’t leave her.’ Her voice sounded a bit odd, and she really did not want to start crying. ‘And if she comes back to school – I know she can’t, but I sometimes have to believe that she could – I need to be there so that she won’t be alone.’

  Livy felt her mother’s fingers on her cheek, the touch so light it was somewhere between a feather and a sigh. ‘Mahalia’s gone too far to come back, Livy,’ she whispered.

  Livy swallowed hard. She had spent the last difficult weeks trying so desperately not to believe this.

  ‘And Dad and I think that you did everything possible for her. You were such a good friend.’

  ‘Perhaps I made it harder.’ Livy’s voice was hardly more than breath, her throat dry. ‘Because she didn’t want to leave me and make me sad.’

  ‘If we didn’t care that we were leaving people we loved, what would be the point of us being here in the first place?’ her mother said at last. ‘You have to care before you can say goodbye and mean it.’

  Livy closed her eyes.

  ‘I know you feel frightened,’ her mother went on, ‘but you need to take this big step. It feels as if you’re stepping into a big empty nothing, but you’ve got me to hold on to you, Livy. And Dad and even little Tom, who thinks he’s quite the strongest boy in the world. We’ll all hold on to you.’

  ‘Promise?’ Livy breathed.

  ‘Promise,’ her mother whispered back. ‘You won’t fall.’

  Livy ‘agreed’. She would go to the ‘interview’ with the headmistress of Temple College, Dr Pernilla Smythe. Although she didn’t really agree, she didn’t seem to be able to get her parents to understand that she didn’t want to go. The ‘interview’ would have to be on a Saturday morning as Dr Smythe was a ‘very busy woman’. If, however, Livy ‘didn’t like Temple College’ despite being given this ‘golden opportunity’, her parents ‘agreed’ to ‘respect her feelings’ and ‘think again’.

  ‘If you really really don’t like it,’ her mother said.

  ‘Although we’re confident that you will,’ her father interrupted.

  ‘We won’t force you to go,’ her mother added.

  ‘Because we’re not those sorts of parents.’ Her father smiled reassuringly. ‘We’re modern parents.’

  ‘What’s an interesting view?’ Tom asked, putting his plane on Livy’s shoulder as her father drove them all towards Temple College.

  ‘An interview? It’s when someone looks at you and decides if you’re interesting,’ Livy muttered. ‘Or not.’

  She felt uncomfortable: her mother had bought her a sombre dress and insisted that Livy tie her hair back, take off the fingerless gloves and swap the ankle boots for flat shoes, which almost caused a row.

  ‘History lesson!’ her father said brightly.

  ‘Please, Dad,’ Livy groaned.

  ‘Every Londoner knows Temple College!’ her father announced as he swerved to avoid a cyclist. ‘Founded in 1563. But do they know the name of the first headmaster?’

  ‘Er, no,’ Livy said. His relentlessly good mood was annoying.

  ‘Who is it, James?’ Livy’s mother sounded genuinely interested.

  ‘Turns out it was one Peter Burgess!’

  ‘Hear that, Livy?’ She craned round from the front seat. ‘Just imagine!’

  ‘Bet he’s no relation,’ Livy said, but the name hung in the air, insisting that it be talked about.

  ‘He may be,’ Livy’s father said. ‘I can’t be sure. Maybe I can do some research in the library and find out! Dr Smythe seems to think we’re related somehow.’

  ‘Was he responsible for those statues on the roof?’ Livy’s mother asked, clearly choosing to ignore Livy’s mood. ‘Those weird angels?’

  ‘They’re called Sentinels, darling. No one calls them statues or angels. And apparently Peter Burgess paid for them all. With his own gold!’

  ‘He was rich?’ Livy’s mother gasped. ‘What went wrong? You’ve never had a penny!’

  ‘Didn’t need it: I’m handsome and clever!’

  ‘Da-ad!’ Livy groaned.

  Minutes later, they stood on the pavement and stared up at the row of statues that lined the roof of Temple College.

  ‘Quite something, aren’t they?’

  ‘Can they fly?’ Tom’s face was tipped right back.

  ‘No, darling,’ laughed his mother. ‘Of course not!’

  ‘But they have wings!’ Tom frowned. ‘Big ones!’

  ‘They’re made of stone, stupid,’ Livy muttered under her breath.

  ‘I’m not stupid! You’re a big fat stupid!’ Tom cried.

  ‘Little birds in the nest should all agree,’ Livy’s mother said, taking Tom by the hand.

  Tom shook his hand free and stuck out his tongue defiantly at Livy. She crossed her eyes and then decided to ignore him by looking up at the roof.

  The Sentinels had magnificent human heads swathed in carved curls, their expressions stern. The stone had been cut to fall in drapes as if they were wearing long gowns. They were all different, she noticed. Some of them had their wings out and seemed to be standing on tiptoe as if they were about to take off while others had downcast heads held in prayer, their wings folded around them like cloaks.

  Livy felt that they were all looking at her, waiting for her to speak.

  ‘Look!’ Tom pointed up and jumped up and down. ‘It’s Count Zacha!’

  ‘This is what comes of letting him watch too much television,’ her mother muttered. ‘He’s obsessed with that character!’

  ‘Why not just tell him that he doesn’t exist?’ Livy said.

  ‘What?’ said Tom, half hearing.

  ‘Oh,
that’s right. Ruin his childhood!’ Livy’s mother said under her breath.

  ‘Oh, I can see him! He’s on the roof – right at the end!’ Tom waved frantically at the furthest Sentinel who, unlike the others, had his back to the river and faced into Temple College. ‘Oh, he’s gone. Will he come back?’

  ‘Of course, Tommy,’ Livy said. ‘Count Zacha will just zoom about doing a bit of really fast flying and then he’ll be right back.’

  Her mother glowered at her, proving that at least one other member of her family understood sarcasm.

  They walked through a small arch in the bone-coloured façade. They were in a sort of tunnel, with a square of daylight ahead of them. A short, round woman with grey hair scraped up into a bun stepped out of a doorway in the wall.

  ‘Miss Lockwood,’ she said, putting out her hand to Livy’s parents. ‘School secretary. Please. Come this way. Dr Smythe is waiting for you.’ She looked down at Tom and sighed. ‘Oh dear. Perhaps we should hide the small thing. Dr Smythe is not keen on –’ she waved her hand at Tom as if she could shoo him away – ‘miniatures.’

  ‘I’ll keep hold of him,’ Livy’s mother said, catching Tom’s hand.

  Miss Lockwood looked uncertain but ushered them through the arch and in to a courtyard.

  They were now surrounded on all sides by walls of grey stone and rows of blank windows. There were plain stone arches and recessed doorways at regular intervals. Everything was ordered, precise and architecturally consistent. Except, in one corner was a narrow, pale tower of flint and brick, much older-looking than the rest of the buildings. The parapet around the roof had weeds growing out of the stone, and all of the windows were bricked up, apart from one, near the top. That small, blank window gave the tower a desolate air. The iron-studded door at the bottom was closed.

  It was on the roof of this tower that the furthest Sentinel stood. With its carved face lifted to the sky, it looked as if it could step into the sky at any moment. Livy held her breath as she imagined the Sentinel reaching up to the clouds and shaking out those enormous wings before leaping into the air and flying powerfully upwards, free at last from centuries of standing on the roof of Temple College. But then she saw that its other wing was broken. If the Sentinel were to move, it could only fall, landing in pieces on the flagstones below.